Sorry I can’t go out today, yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah, I’ve got them saint james infirmary blues. Yeah, sorry. Can we reschedule for next week? Ok, yeah, ok.. ok! Sounds good, see you then
Welcome to this musical time travel adventure. The art of recording evolved at the same time the world was on fire. Two world wars and a depression in between was the backdrop to the beginnings of modern music. This is Pre-War America and, as long as you are an Apple Music or Spotify subscriber, you can experience it.
”I wish we could go back in time when all music was clean!”
1930s music:
“She hung around with a bloke named Smokey | She loved him though he was cokey | He took her down to Chinatown | and showed her how to kick the gong around” (“kick the gong” is slang for “smoke the opium pipe”)
And then there’s that one British guy who wrote an entire song entitled “My Girl’s Pussy,” using a cat for a euphemism for, well… what do you fucking think? He “strokes it every night!”
You may recognize the hook from recent popular songs (in my day it was "Your Woman" by White Town), but this is the original version by Lew Stone & His Monseigneur Band.
Many thanks to @hellsehend for the footage of daddy dancing! 💜🎩
Eddy Duchin, 1937: “the Merry Go Round Broke Down”
Better known from a sped-up instrumental that became the Looney Tunes theme song, it was originally a moderate-paced normal song with lyrics and everything (starting around 1:00), but to promote it they paid Warner Bros to put it in a cartoon (not uncommon back then, Van Beuren cartoons did it a lot) and it just kinda stuck